


(love) in the language of loss

by savingophelia (briennesbeauty)



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M, all canonverse btw, also we’re canon next season and im convinced so there’s that, big season 9 spoilers btw, but i do go fill some little gaps, don’t even ask okay i am EMOTIONAL, five stages of grief as a love story, nonsense grammar for the Aesthetic, trash author is back with new extended trash!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 07:45:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18734692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/briennesbeauty/pseuds/savingophelia
Summary: they fell in love the same way they grieved; terribly, tenderly, together.or, the five stages of grief as carol and daryl's love story





	(love) in the language of loss

**Author's Note:**

> i got this concept off tumblr. carol and daryl have ruined my entire life. i am stupidly convinced we are going to be canon next season. 
> 
> this is 1000+ words of my emotions about various things in a completely all over the place non-linear mess. what even is this
> 
> that’s it that’s all i have to say

_( - i. where the flowers grow )_

If there’s one thing both of them learn from it all, it’s that the course of grief is not linear, and love is not a straight line. The path to healing may not be short and it may not paved. It may not always be easy, or lit by the warmth of the sun, but it’s where the Cherokee roses bloom. 

They fall in love the same way they grieve, the way they always have; fully and fiercely. Terribly, tenderly, _together._

 

_i. denial_

_at this stage, the world becomes overwhelming. life makes no sense. denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. there is grace in denial. it is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.  
\- the first stage ___

__

__-_ _

__

It starts when a man with bloody fingers hands her a pickaxe. 

The sun is glaring down over the quiet campground and flashing off the water in the quarry. All the clouds have been burned away, and her husband is dead in the dirt at her feet. She’s never spoken directly to this man before and she doesn’t suppose he’s ever even looked at her. He looks at her now, squinting in the harsh light, but he doesn’t say a word. He holds out the pickaxe and the blade gleams in the sun. There’s blood and dirt under his ragged nails. 

It takes all her courage to take the thing from him. It’s so heavy she can barely lift it. But she brings it down with everything she has in her (and everything she doesn’t, because of _him_ ) and there’s a terrible _crunch_ , and blood and bits of brain stick to the soles of her shoes. Her arms ache and tears burn behind her eyes and she’s sick to her stomach but she swings it down again, again, again. Not for the last time, Carol fights through the pain until the work is done. 

Daryl stands back a little. He’s surprised and he’s not surprised at all. He thinks about his dad and watches til it’s over. 

__

__-_ _

__

There are some things in this world too big to think about. (The end of it, for one.) 

A little girl vanishes into the woods at the side of the road, and suddenly there are thousands of possibilities flying through the air like crossbow bolts, but she can’t let herself accept any one of them. A man with dirty ragged nails and hard eyes stamps through the prickly undergrowth and shoots the rotten heads of the dead, with the kind of stubborn, fearless hope that she’d forgotten humans had. 

Daryl Dixon wrenches himself out of bed and slings his crossbow over his tired shoulder, because he can’t bear listening to her crying any more. He stalks through the undergrowth, calling the girl’s name over and over again until it stops sounding like anything and becomes some tired animal’s warning call, rough in his dry mouth, _Sophia Sophia Sophia._

He keeps thinking about bruises and bloody axeheads and blue eyes and his Da, about the little girl all alone out there and the mother, sick and snot-nosed with fear in the shitty RV bed. He shoves it all down deep where it can’t choke him, and he follows trails, digs his heels into the mud, carves marks into the bark of trees, slits open the rotting bellies of the dead. 

This is the state of denial, of the beginning of grief, the edge of love.)

__

As the days drag on with no sign of Sophia, the two of them are pulled together, separate from the others, in a way that makes no sense and neither of them can really explain, even to themselves. They don’t really talk more – it’s just an awareness, an understanding, a knowing. As if they’ve been tied together by some invisible string. 

Without meaning to, they have become a team.

__

“Daryl has surprised me, you know,” Lori admits one day, scrubbing shirts under the swaying shade of the trees. She rolls her eyes pointedly at Carol, thin brows raised, probing for answers she doesn’t have. “The things he’s doing for you and your girl. You’d never think...” 

Carol buries her hands in the tepid soapy water and presses her lips together. Overhead, the green leaves rustle. She says nothing. There’s nothing to say. 

__

“You’re good for her,” Dale says, around the evening cookfire, sending a look sideways at him. “No matter how this awful business turns out. That’s what I think, anyway. Poor woman’s been through enough as it is.”

“Hell if I know,” Daryl snaps under his breath, standing up abruptly and scraping off his plate. He drops it on the camp chair and stalks off, to the quiet retreat of his tent. His cheeks burn with a prickly, crawly heat. _Damn Georgia sun_ , he swears to himself, kicking off his boots. 

__

_They_ don’t talk about it. They don’t have to. They’re learning that they can communicate far more easily in other ways, far more easily than either of them ever dreamed any kind of communication could be. 

The day he comes into the RV with a rose in a beer bottle proves that. 

He stands in front of her, lingering by the door as if he’s afraid to come any further. His shoulders are tense and his eyes restless, but something about him softens somehow as he tells his story. She watches him, unable to look away. The dusty light sends shadows over his unshaven face. There’s more kindness and care in his rough voice than she’s heard for a long time. 

“I’m not fool enough to think there’s any flowers blooming for my brother.” He says. “But uh, I believe this one bloomed for your little girl.”

When she realises he’s done, she tries to thank him but the words get lost somewhere in her throat and turn to tears instead. She has to look away before he burns her eyes, like the sun. 

But he understands. He turns, lingering awkwardly at the front of the RV in the dull afternoon sunlight. “She’s gonna really like it in here.”

After he leaves, Carol sits with a lump in her throat and watches the way the light from the window makes the white petals almost shine. She thinks about him, out there every day, putting himself in danger. Thinks about comfort, and how wrong people can be about each other. 

She wipes her wet face and wishes she could have said something, anything, that might have come close to all the things she wants him to know. But how could she? She doesn’t even know herself.

(She’d forgotten people are kind. She thinks that might be something else he understands.) 

__

They fall into a rhythm. 

(They’re realising that somewhere very deep down, they are the same. She’s starting to try and work out who she might be without Ed’s shadow falling over her, and he’s trying to figure out who he is without Merle’s. But it goes beyond all that. Somehow they speak the same language, one nobody else on the farm understands. They walk to the same broken beat.) 

Daryl stomps back from tracking all day, grass-stained and sore, with sweat on his brow and scrapes on his knuckles, and for the first time since Rick walked back into camp instead of his brother, somebody smiles to see him come home. She avoids his eye as she scrapes an extra helping of beans onto his plate, and something warm glows in his chest as he pretends not to notice. 

Sometimes they’ll all be sitting around on the peeling porch, or under the spreading shade of the trees out back, and her blue eyes will find his like an arrow. They always flit away again, just as quick. It gives Daryl a lump in his throat, but so do a lot of things. 

She still flinches at loud noises. Once, Andrea slams a door and he hears her breathe in from across the room, so sharp and loud. He wishes he could make it better, but he can’t, so he just glowers at Andrea as he stalks out the room (then closes the door very gently behind him). 

He still prefers to be alone. Nobody else seems to notice, but she always makes sure someone’s brought him dinner, whether he’s alone in his tent or not. 

He notices that she has freckles. Tiny, barely-there freckles, rising to the surface of her skin under the light of the sun. It’s weird.

She notices that he picks at his thumbnail when he doesn’t want to make eye contact with someone, which is most of the time. It’s annoying. 

He walks into the house and she’s there, or he crosses by the tents and sees her sitting outside the RV, and she always smiles at him. It’s this tiny, tight, _trying_ kind of smile that he’s never seen her give to anyone else before. (He tries to smile back every time. He doesn’t always quite manage, but all this is new and confusing, and he’s still learning.)

They wander round the knee-high grass side by side as it withers under the sun, surrounded by the water and the tangled roses and they don’t say much. Daryl’s chest feels stiff and tight, and Carol is strangely aware of her breath. _This isn’t happening_ , they both think, at one point or another. _This can’t be what’s happening._

Daryl looks at her, sharp and pale with her blue eyes that look at him like she knows everything he’s never said out loud, and picks at the dry skin on his thumb so he doesn’t have to think about the twisting in his gut. 

(He has a scab on his heart. It itches whenever she’s around, but he doesn’t scratch it. He’s scared of what might come leaking out.)

____ _ _

The day he gets shot in the head, all the shit that’s been simmering is coming to a boil inside of him, and he’s never wanted to run off and scratch the face off the whole world more. He wants to tear down the whole forest, tree by rotten tree, until he finds that girl. He wants to wrench up his insides and tug them out so they’ll stop hurting and messing up his mind. He wants to exorcise his brother.

But of course, he can’t do any of that. All he can do is let them bandage his bloody scalp and slink off, armoured in anger. He crawls beneath the blankets and turns his back to the door, even though it hurts to lay on his sore shoulder. It’s weird to be in a real bed, in the house, too, with the air so thick and stuffy. 

When he hears footsteps coming down the hall, his whole body tenses under the sheets. He glares at the wall in the dim light and wills whoever it is just to leave him alone. To hell if it’s the vet. He’ll take his pills in the morning.

But the footsteps are light and tentative, the barest whispers against the old hardwood floor. 

Daryl’s breath gets snared somewhere in his ribs. His heart clenches tighter than his fist. His tongue is thick and useless in his dry mouth. He presses his cheek against the soft pillow and tries to pretend he hasn’t heard. Then the door creaks open and he winces against the pain, struggling to tug the sheets up around his chest to cover his naked back on time. 

She’s carrying a tray. She sets it down lightly at his bedside. 

"How are you feeling?” She asks, in a tiny voice. He wonders if she’s as unused to asking these things as he as to being asked. 

"’bout as good as I look,” He mumbles into the pillow. His cheeks are burning and he doesn’t know why. Probably the damn meds, that’s all. 

"I brought you dinner.” She says, as if it’s normal for her to be thinking about him, to be worrying about him. “You must be starving.”

Daryl breathes carefully, in and out against the pillow. It’s pathetic. His heart is thudding so loud he’s wonders if she can hear it. She leans over him, moving tentatively around the hot flinty anger inside him, and her kiss is light and quick as summer rain on his forehead. 

He mumbles something about stitches and pretends his whole body doesn’t feel like kindling, like he’s about to catch on fire from the inside out. She lingers at the bedside. The silence stretches and strains around them in the little room. Something simmers in the air between them, too hot to touch.

He waits for her to give up and leave. She doesn’t. 

"You need to know something.” Carol says, in a voice so soft and certain, even as it wavers in the shaky lamplight. “You did more for my little girl today than her own daddy ever did in his whole life.” 

Daryl swallows. It’s hard, with the lump in his throat the size of Jupiter. “Didn’t do anythin’ Rick or Shane wouldn’t a done." 

"I know.” She tells him. Behind the thin curtains, the sun shifts behind a cloud and makes the shadows dance. “You’re every bit as good as them. Every bit.”

Nobody’s ever said anything like that to him before. 

He hears her lingering in the doorway. For a second he aches for her to just stay there, in the streaky yellow light in the doorframe, not talking to him, not doing anything, just standing. Just there. Her footsteps are quiet, but he _feels_ it when she goes.

____He curls tighter into the blankets and he doesn’t get much sleep._ _ _ _

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

_( i.v. when the grief breaks )_

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

The first time the grief breaks, it breaks over their heads like the crest of some great wave, and it sends them crashing violently together, when previously they’ve been dancing around each other. 

Carol falls to the ground with Daryl’s arms tangled round her. 

They’re all scraped knees and grazed palms in the dust and dirt. All Daryl can do is watch as the monster that used to be her little girl staggers out of the barn. All he can hear is her whimpers, all he can feel is the cold sweat on her skin and the way her breath shakes inside her chest, like something dying under his palm. She crumples gradually into the dust, as if all the hope and hate that’s been holding her up is leaking out of her in fits and gasping starts, like blood from a wound. 

And still he holds on, ignoring the way his own guts writhe and choke inside him. Something in him is so cold it burns, but still he rubs her shoulder and presses his hand over her bony chest, as if somehow he can get all the way through to her breaking heart. (It should be the other way around, but he holds onto her like she’s a lifeline and he’ll drown if he lets go.) 

____ _ _

Carol’s throat is closed, she cannot speak. She can’t see clearly through the dust and tears. She can’t _think_ , because there are no words that can contain this. All she can do is dig her nails in the dirt and let it break over her and through her. She clings to the ground and shakes her head. And while the grief tears through her body and rips apart everything she is, she can feel his arms around her, and smell the sweat and sunshine on his skin. She can’t make sense of sound, but later – years later – she will remember how his ragged, ruined breath rushed by her ear.

And just like that, it’s done. Like a contract, signed in blood on bone. It’s unspoken. They go through hell together now, holding on that tight. The tiny threads that tugged at them now tie them together tighter than they will ever know. 

The grief crashes over their heads like waves, dragging them down, throwing them against one another, and for the first time (but not the last), they break together. 

Denial is no longer enough. 

(It’s funny though, how falling in love can happen at the same time as fall apart, and the end of the world can be the start of yours.) 

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

_ii. anger_

_as the numbing stage of denial wears off, anger begins to take hold. You search for blame and lash out. there are many other emotions underneath the anger, but they’re harder to manage. the shock is so overwhelming it feels like you’re not anchored to anything, but anger gives you structure.  
\- the second stage_

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

They bury Sophia. Daryl stands there looking at the mound of earth, sweat sticking the back of his shirt to his neck, wondering why the hell he’s here when her mom isn’t. He lays awake at night staring up at the shadows of trees through the thin canvas of his tent and lets the fury fester in him, like pus in his wide open wound. 

(He should know better than to get near the word _family_. He should know better than to try. To try to save anything, to try to care for anything, to be saved, to be cared for, it’s all bullshit. Merle’s ghost is smarter than he is.) 

He’ll never know why she comes down to his camp that night. Why she steals out of the RV under the starless sky and walks openly across the wide field to his tent, risking getting attacked or bit (or maybe hoping for it). 

But when he sees her, pale and sharp as a ghost in the moonlight, concern creasing her face as she takes in the bloody ears and dead things strung up outside his tent, it’s like a spark strikes off all the anger kindling in him, and he can't take it any more. 

"What are you doin’?” He snaps. 

Carol looks at him, and not for the first time he catches the unexpected glint of steel in her soft blue eyes. “Keeping an eye on you."

The night is still, the warm Georgia air alive with the chirp of crickets and the distant rustle of leaves. In the darkness, she stands like a ghost, moonlight and shadows dancing over her pale skin. Daryl’s heart is lost somewhere in his stomach. He can feel it, hot and red and frantic, like it’s trying to beat its way out of his chest. Like it’s trying to get her attention. Like it’s trying to get to her. 

He can’t handle this, her with her blue eyes and old bruises and empty voice and her dead daughter standing in between them. It feels like something inside him is splintering away. He should know better. He should have known better. 

All the while he rants, throwing the most awful words he can think of at her, digging deep into every wound he can find. She just stands her ground in silence. And the words that are spilling out of him, the anger that’s finally bubbling over, it’s scalding him half to death. But it’s not touching her. (She has her own anger, caged tight inside her, and she guards it firmly with quiet dignity.) He digs deeper, harder, crueller, and still, still she doesn’t respond. She doesn’t try and hurt him back. 

"You ain’t my problem, lady.” He tries harder, hurls his words at her, at the world (and at himself, mostly). His voice cracks against the glassy night sky. “Sophia wasn’t mine!” (He’s trying to remind himself that.) “All you had to do was keep an eye on her!” 

Carol flinches back on instinct and when the moonlight glances off her pale cheek and Daryl realises why, his fists drop to his sides and uncurl like flowers. (Something _aches_ , deep, deep in his bloody beating heart.) 

He’s watching her like a hawk. Even in the dark, it’s clear there are no tears on her pale face. He doesn’t scare her at all. And that makes it so, so, much worse. Because she looks at him, with her soft blue eyes and her freckles and her gentle hands, and he is _terrified_. 

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

Time passes, and turns wounds to scars. 

But one thing that never gets any easier is the anger. He feels like it’s always waiting for him, just under the surface, and every time they lose someone it breaks right through. (It reminds him of the old days. Of his dad, his brother, of the person he swore he didn’t ever want to be.)

His anger is his anchor, as it always has been. His anger is brutal and uncompromising, it’s rough and it’s violent, and when it comes over him like a storm cloud everyone seems to know to stay the hell away until it’s passed.

Everyone else, at least. 

With a smile, she disarms him. With a flicker of her sky-bright eyes, he’s lost. 

Anger, Daryl thinks, standing outside a prison block with her hand squeezing his, ain’t so hard when someone else gets it too. Her fingers are warm and reassuring. The sky is grey, her eyes are blue, and he thinks they might just be okay. 

____ _ _

Beth’s death is different. (Actually, it’s not that different at all, and that’s why it hurts so damn much.)

He sits at the side of the road burning cigarette holes in his hands and thinking about the (second) stupid girl he couldn’t save. (When he comes back to the group, he can’t meet her eyes. If he looked at her, she’d know. If he looked at her, the anger keeping him upright would crack and fall away. If she looked at him, he’d break.)

Even when they split from the rest of the group to look for food, he’s distant. They trudge together through the tall grass and syrupy silence, and though the sky is overcast, she can feel the heat of the anger radiating off him. Sure, he’s defensive and snappy and hard-eyed as he always is when he’s mad, but this time he’s not throwing it at anyone in particular, not acting out. This time he’s acting in, cutting himself up on his own fury. 

She gives him back Beth’s knife, and the words he once gave her, “We’re not dead.”

Her blue eyes pin him down, and his heart flutters jaggedly but there’s nowhere to run. She looks at him, and there’s nowhere to go. He doesn't say a thing. The secrets evaporate, the walls start to crumble, and the denial is stretching, almost too thin to hold. 

He waits for her to get mad or give up. She doesn’t do anything like that. She brushes the limp hair from his sweaty forehead, her touch gentle as snowfall. She kisses him softly on the brow. The rage inside him quiets for a moment, calmed by something in her lips, in her fingertips. 

Maybe this is how they work, taking it in turns to be furiously lost, and to fervently find one another. 

____ _ _

His anger has never fazed her, not for one second. 

She and anger are old friends. 

____ _ _

( _Her_ anger, though. 

It’s _consumed_ her before, like wildfire. Now _she_ consumes _it_. She takes it and pushes it all to the right places inside of herself, transforms it to energy, to plans, to bullets, to the blood of her enemies, to ashes at her feet. She’s only human, he knows. He’s seen her anger the messiest, the ugliest, the most violent and hopeless it’s ever been. But there’s something holy about her anger, and he sees that too, every time he looks at her. 

Her anger takes his breath away.) 

____ _ _

Years later, she will realise in a small, quiet moment that they’ve never once been angry at each other. Angry at herself, yes. For a while that was _all_ she felt. And heaven only knows the fury he’s thrown at himself. But they’ve never once been truly, deeply angry at one another. Even the hardest days on the farm, in the aftermath, they were never really angry at _each other_ and they both knew it.

They’ve always been angry at other things, _together_. 

____ _ _

(And angry _for_ each other, sometimes, when it’s necessary. 

She sits in a concrete cell across from a man who, once upon a time, would have had her cowering with a glance, and calmly she meets his eyes, wondering how they are so unlike his little brother’s. “If you screw this up, mess with Daryl,” She tells him simply. “I will slit your throat while you sleep.”

She hopes she doesn’t have to. But she would, without hesitation, for him. 

____ _ _

He hits a metal rail at the prison, willing it to break, because she’s just _gone_ and nobody thought to talk to him first. (Nobody thought to ask him if he'd rather go with her.)

____ _ _

She stands alone in eerie stillness, blood smeared on her face like war paint, in a room filled with the belongings of the dead. Outside, Terminus is dying too. She can hear the distant growl of walkers, the crackle of the leaping flames. She finds Rick’s watch and thinks that’s bad, but when she sees the crossbow her heart plummets through her like a stone. She goes straight to it, breath caught in her throat, and slings it carefully over her shoulder, glad she’s already blown a piece of this place to high hell. 

When the woman catches her in the middle of their fucked up shrine, Carol almost chokes on the hate in her throat. “Where are the men you pulled from that train car?”

(Usually, when she fights and kills, it’s simple. It’s not easy, but it’s rational and focused. It’s doing what needs to be done. She’s never touched on this kind of rage before, this kind of satisfaction in slaughter.) 

“ _Where are they?_ ” She demands again, and the instant she doesn’t get an answer she squeezes the trigger just to feel the shot burst out and see the woman fall. 

Carol watches her writhing and groaning through gritted teeth on the ground, rifle still trained on her. She thinks about the room where she found the crossbow, insides thrumming with panic and pain and cold, cold anger. 

She turns around, picking Daryl’s crossbow back up on the way, and leaves her to bleed. 

____ _ _

He stands in a field with his crossbow hanging from his hand, staring at this guy – _Richard_ , he thinks, he makes a point of remembering – thinking of Carol sitting alone in a house somewhere and of the kingdom and the chaos all around them.

"You stay the hell away from Carol, you hear me?” Daryl warns, with pain and panic sawing through him. 

The next thing he knows he’s on the ground on top of him, breathless and burning, his fist crashing over and over and over again into his worthless fucking face until he feels the satisfying crunch of bone against his knuckles, and the wet burst of blood under his hand. And after, when they’re scrambled to their feet covered in dust, he stands in the dirt, breathing hard, and levels his crossbow at Richard’s broken bloody face.

"I know that Carol, living on her own like that...” Richard says, as if he knows her, as if he has _any right_. “She might as well be dead right now.”

"She gets hurt,” Daryl manages. He’s caught his breath now, and he’s caught on fire too, feels like. He lowers his bow, relying only on the words he flings like razors against the other man. “She dies, she catches a fever, she gets taken out by a walker, she gets hit by lightning, anything. Anything happens to her, I’ll kill you."

He doesn’t remember the last time he was so furious he felt his head reeling like that.)

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

_iii. bargaining_

_Guilt often accompanies bargaining. We may even bargain with our own feelings. We will do anything not to feel the pain. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the emotion.  
\- stage three _

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

After the farm falls, that's when they really start to build a new life for themselves. 

The days at the prison, funnily enough, are some of the happiest of Daryl’s life, when he looks back on them. (It’s ironic really, when he spent his whole life swearing he’d never end up behind bars like they all said.) He has somewhere safe to sleep. Strong walls and gates around him. Food on the table more nights than not. A family, or something that feels damn close to it. 

And, for the first time, a best friend. (That’s what it is, he decides. That’s what it needs to be anyway, for a while, for now. That’s something they can both cope with.)

They move on, together, inch by tiny inch. 

With quiet jokes, smiling eyes, nudging shoulders and telling glances they push at the boundaries, just a little, just enough. Seeing how far this thing will stretch, though neither of them are brave enough to push it any farther. ( _Funny_ , Daryl thinks. They’re brave enough to look into the hungry eyes of the dead and smash in their rotting heads. But this...) They’re still new to this, still a little scared it might break. 

They’re testing barriers. They’re trying to make sense of the strangeness that still makes them both uneasy, still makes them both uncertain. And sure, the dead keep coming, the living keep going (keep _going_ ). But for brief moments, they’ve snatched something. 

They laugh together outside the prison that first night. She’s the first person ever to tease him like that and get away with it, but his offer to rub the tension from her narrow shoulders is genuine (though once he starts he feels hot and itchy and heat flares up his neck, and he thinks she must sense it by the way she stiffens and goes quiet). 

Somewhere along the line, Carol stops praying. Daryl still has her silver crucifix in the inside pocket of his bag in the back of his cell, the chain all tangled up with Sophia’s rotted doll. (He doesn’t ever take them out of look at them. He thinks that might just kill him. It’s just knowing there they’re. He can’t bring himself to throw them away.) 

They sit across from each other in his cell. He plays with the frayed edges of his poncho across his lap. She makes him laugh even when he thinks he’s forgotten how. 

A few times they even manage to break off on a supply runs together and for a brief moment, there’s just the road, the sky, and the sacred simplicity of him by her side. 

And there’s the small, unspoken belief, that if they’re just gentle enough, just careful enough with this fragile thing they hold between them, it might be enough to last.

(It’s strange, because it’s so easy, so natural between them. And yet they’re so careful that sometimes, he’s almost scared to meet Carol’s eyes. She’s like the sun. Bright, beautiful, and dangerous to look directly at.) 

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

_iv. depression_

_in this stage, our attention moves into the present, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level than we ever thought possible.  
\- stage four _

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

Carol has burned cities to the ground with no one at her side, and left no one standing. She’s ended more lives than she can count, though she used to try ( _stupid_ , that was _stupid_ ). She knows there are men that look at her and are awed by the things she’s done, and she knows there are men that are scared, too. 

(And there’s one man, just one, who looks at her and _knows_. Simply, softly, he just _knows_. He always has done. That’s why she can’t bring herself to look at him sometimes, and why other times it’s all she can do not to throw herself at him and hold on so tight her fingernails break.)

By now, grief is no longer something that happens to them, it’s something they are. Something they carry with them wherever they go, like a sack of bones slung over their shoulder. Sometimes it’s easy to forget it’s even there. And sometimes, without warning or reason, it becomes so heavy it makes Carol feel like she’s about to sink into the ground. It doesn’t make sense. She doesn’t understand at all. She tries, tries to work through it all methodically but that just gives her a headache. It’s nothing simple, nothing she can put a label on. 

It’s finding your family again against all odds (the people you love so hard it hurts) and wanting to drive far away from them again that very night. It’s sitting in a darkened room with a list of numbers in front of her and faces she can’t remember fading from her mind. It’s walking off down an empty road with a sharpened rosary hanging from her hand and wanting to keep going forever. It’s her bloody fingers shaking around a cigarette. (Her breath getting stuck in her throat and her chest filling with staticky panic and the word _weak, weak, weak, weak, weak_ flitting all through her.) It’s Morgan and his damn philosophy. 

Carol sits in the dark with her head in her hands and the sounds of her breath and her heart rushing in her ears. She feels very sick, very deep down inside of herself. Sometimes she wants to scratch all her skin off and start again. Or hit something over and over til it breaks like a bastard’s face under a pickaxe in the sun. Or pile everything into the trunk of a car and drive until it all just disappears behind. Or sleep. God, to _sleep_. (Not to die. Death isn’t a full stop anymore, it’s barely worth a thought.) Just to sleep and sleep and not wake up. 

Sometimes the grief is like a black hole or a bruise. It threatens to swallow her whole. It gets so big she has to leave everything behind and shut the little doors of a little cottage up tight and hope to God the kings and killers don’t come knocking. 

____ _ _

The days Carol spends in the empty house beside the empty road are strange.

Sometimes she wakes up breathing frantically in the middle of the night, a bitter taste in her mouth and nothing to be afraid of. Sometimes she doesn’t get to sleep at all. Sometimes she sleeps longer than she did when she was a teenager and wakes alone, feeling more tired than she was before. She stretches and wraps her hands around a steaming mug and watches the light crawl over the scraggly fields outside the dusty window. She lets herself sit with her feet up on the end of the couch, to rinse her face in cold water every morning and read trashy paperbacks, their brown pages thin and stained.

Carol doesn’t feel lonely, exactly. She doesn’t feel peaceful either. But she doesn’t quite feel like such a monster or such a machine, and that’s almost more than she could have dared to hope for. She lifts the chipped rim of her coffee cup to her lips and blows away the steam. She wonders if this is it for her now. 

____ _ _

He cuts through it all like a crossbow bolt. 

Just on time, every time.

____ _ _

(He’s done it before, after all.

She remembers slouching against a wall in the dark, somewhere deep in the hidden guts of the prison, exhausted and aching. She was hazy, falling in and out of consciousness the way she used to after Ed slammed the door. This time though, the door opened. 

Slowly, with a creak, and then a slice of dusty golden sun fell across her. She remembered his hand against her chin, unbearably gentle, lifting her face to the light. The edges of her vision were still fuzzy, her thoughts soupy and thick. But she still remembers, vaguely, the moment she recognised Daryl’s face in the doorway, and the moment he picked her up in his arms and she saw the pulse jump in his throat before she blacked out again. 

____ _ _

She remembers standing out by a car in the dark outside the church, a dull pain in her heart and the voices of her family soft and blurry, from afar. Her heart _jolted_ when she realised he was standing there watching, because if there was one thing she didn’t want to leave, it was him. 

_What are you doing?_ He’d asked, and she’d been completely honest when she told him she didn’t know. 

Her head was still ringing from the way he ran to her before, golden light of the forest in his greasy hair, and lifted her up and squeezed her so tight she swore she could feel his heart beating against hers, and all the bad things evaporated for a moment. 

____ _ _

She remembers every second of their time in the city, searching for Beth. She thinks about it sometimes. 

About him cutting in front of her to check rooms, kill walkers, burn the dead. About how he did everything he could to make it better for her, without ever once pushing or patronizing. 

About how he laid down beside her on a hard bed in a cold shelter in a dead city, with all the ghosts of the people they’d been laying between them. 

_When we were out by the car_ , he’d asked. _What if I didn’t show up?_

_I still don’t know_ , she told him again, staring up at the ceiling in the dark, wishing she had something better to say. 

Even then, he didn’t ask for more or wish for less. He just laid with her in the dark, silently, and they counted each other’s breath while a strange peace settled over them both, like dust.

____ _ _

And later, much later, when the weight is much worse, she remembers walking with Maggie out of the Saviour’s compound, a bloody rosary hanging from her fingers. The next thing she knew, the doorway was opening up and Daryl was in front of her, holding her shoulders, easing her out the way of the others. 

She remembers his fingers against her chin, barely there, like he was scared of touching her. (He wasn’t, though, of course he wasn’t. He’s never seen a monster in her, no more than he’s seen a mouse. For someone who’s spent her whole life fighting between being a victim and a villain, he has never once seen either. He just sees her, just Carol. In the good times, and the really, really bad ones.)

"You good?” He’d asked her, in that way that usually sufficed to say everything between them. 

Carol can remember swallowing, her tongue thick in her dry mouth. She couldn’t lie to him. “No.”

She remembers how he pulled her into his arms, his voice getting lost in her hair. She remembers how his hand cupped the back of her head, the way hers had when she last held him, when it was his turn to be suffocating in all that grief. 

She remembers all those times and all the rest, too. No matter how small it seems, Carol never once forgets that every time she’s been so low she could scarcely breathe, he’s the one that’s always been solid and real in front of her.)

____ _ _

And somehow, when she’s shut the door of her little house tight and thinks what’s left of the world might finally move on without her, he finds her again. (Finds her _still_ , because he never loses her, not really, not for good, and they both know it.) 

She opens the door expecting the king or somebody else she has to tell plainly to leave her alone, but there he is, just standing on the porch like he’s been waiting for her all this time. 

She blinks and looks at him and something in her crumples. He stands and looks at her and the half of the crumpled thing that lives inside him breaks, too. 

“Why’d you go?” He says, and she’s never heard him sound like that before, not ever.

He looks at her with his eyes shining and for the first time in a long time, Carol feels _real_. She can’t find any words to say, so she pulls him into her arms instead and holds him until the smell of his skin is all around her and she starts to remember who she is. 

He sits across the room from her at the splintery table. He tells her beautiful lies that give her the time she needs. His crossbow rests gently against the wall like it belongs there. She sits by the fire, the warmth of the flames on her face. She still feels fragile, like her skin is barely holding her together, but he makes her laugh through her tears and her heart lift inside her when she thought it had turned to stone. 

They eat dinner. Their cutlery clinks against the chipped plates. The dead outside the door disappear, for a while. (The ghosts are there with them again – they have shared custody of a chunk of the past and it will always sit between them, but there’s something okay about that, something warm and familiar.) 

And when he leaves, they stand on the porch with the cool night breeze whispering through the distant trees. Neither of them is quite ready to say goodbye. (They never are. But they learned long ago, love and grief don’t give you that choice.) Daryl turns around and then runs back up the garden path to pull her into another hug, because he can’t not. 

So Carol buries herself in his shoulder, pressing her eyes closed as she tries to commit every thread of his shirt under her fingers to memory. She breathes in the way his rough skin smells of sweat and sunshine. She squeezes him against her and wishes she could memorize the rhythm of his breath, his chest rising and falling against hers, the way she used to memorize the beats of her favourite songs. 

Daryl drops his head against her shoulder and the lump in his throat comes back. Now she smells of soap and coffee, and vaguely of ash from the fire. Her shirt is soft and he can feel the warmth of her body through it, through his shirt too. He can’t tell if they’re breathing in time or not. Letting go is hard. He pulls away from her and he’s surprised he doesn’t lose any skin. 

"You watch out for yourself, alright,” he tells her, and his voice is small around the lump in his throat. 

She’s not sure if she can do that just yet, but she watches him go, moonlight on his shoulders, and for now that’s enough. 

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

_v. acceptance_

_acceptance is realising this new reality is our permanent reality. it is the new normal, and we learn to live with it. life has been forever changed and we must readjust. finding acceptance may just be having more good days than bad ones.  
\- the final stage _

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

She sits herself down at his side, her hip against his hip, starlight in her silver hair and the soft lines of her pensive face, the night spreading out, still and quiet all around them. 

"You know I’m happy for you,” He has to drag the words up from the pit of his stomach. When they fall out into the night, he barely recognises his own voice. “If anyone deserves to be happy, it’s you.” 

That much is true at least. Might be the only true thing he knows.

“Don’t like not seein’ you, though.” Daryl tells her, before he can even think. 

Carol’s very quiet. Not just her voice, but the way her breath comes out, the way she crosses her pale wrists, the way her eyes look out into the night like she can see through it. Her mind is in a million places at once tonight, and he thinks he knows all million reasons why. 

“He asked me to marry him.” Carol says, and Daryl feels like he’s been smashed in the face. 

She delivers her words too carefully, too casually for such a pickaxe blow. For the rest of the conversation, he finds it hard to look at her (and equally hard to look away). 

He offers to stay here with her, because it’s all he has to offer, and she declines because after all this time, she still knows him too damn well. He swings his feet against the wall. He’s feeling that thing in his gut again. 

Carol just looks at him.

It’s pathetic. Carol just looks at him, and it steals the breath from his lungs. Carol _just looking at him_ is enough to melt the skin from his bones. Carol looks at him like her eyes can bore through right to the core of him without even trying. 

She lays her head against his shoulder like it belongs there, and tucks her arm into his.

(He always notices how well they fit together when she does shit like that. How the plane of her cheek fits against the slope of his shoulder. Her breath is warm and light, her hair is soft and tickles the side of his neck. Something tight melts a little in his chest, even as his stomach turns over and over.) 

As they sink deeper into the smooth silence, Daryl nestles his head against hers just slightly, just enough to feel her hair brush against his cheek. He counts her breath and wonders if she can hear his heart hammering away. He thinks about the kid and the king and the times he’s glimpsed them kissing and stalked straight out to brain some walkers, as bloodily and messily as he could manage.

(He meant what he said. He just wants her to be happy. That’s all he’s ever wanted. That, and to believe it was possible. If that’s what this marriage is, he can get on board with it. He’d get on board a goddamn train to hell, if that’s what it took to make her happy.)

So he does what he’s good at. He doesn’t say anything. He just holds her as much as he dares and gives her the silence she needs. He closes his eyes for a moment and breathes in the soft smell of her hair.

Time passes. 

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

_So this is it_ , he thinks, without really putting it into so many words. 

Daryl wanders round the woods with mud sticking to his boots. The air is heavy and damp with the threat of rain. A river rushes nearby. A dog barks. He spends his days walking silently through the trees, tracking rabbits and stabbing dead people through the skull and missing his brother (not the first one, though he misses him too. That’s a duller ache now, a quieter pain. The second brother, the gold-badge brother who he wanted to kill then spent six years saving). 

He makes tea out of nettles in a pot over his fire as it crackles and spits into the heavy sky. He scrapes tin plates into the dirt and counts down the days til he sees her again. And it’s okay. He’s okay, for a man searching the woods for the battered body of his makeshift brother. For the most part. There’s a strange peace to it. 

There are days when he wakes up aching from sleeping bad on a rock or root and all he wants is the feel of her arms around him and the way her hair smells, under the smoke and blood and pine that everything smells of now. He wants to see her blue eyes, bright, teasing him and making him laugh like a little boy. (He wants to tell her a lot of things, but he doesn’t even have the words to tell himself.) But that’s nothing new. He manages. He gets on. He tries, anyway. _She certainly is_. 

When she does come, boots crunching through the undergrowth, sunlight flaring off her smile and through the trees, Daryl’s heart lifts and he feels... light. He lets her sit by his side at his cookfire and for a few hours he thinks everything might be okay, so long as she’s laughing at his table manners, and her shoulder keeps knocking his. 

____ _ _

Once, she leaves it longer than usual between her visits – nobody’s fault, just things coming up at the Kingdom, and Daryl’s search taking him to the wrong places at the wrong times – and when he sees her after that, she smiles and calls him _stranger_. All he can do is swallow hard and look at her. 

Later, they’re sitting beside his small fire as it crackles away, spitting embers up into the night, their knees touching, their steaming mugs of nettle tea cradled in their laps. 

"You let ya hair get long,” Daryl says at last, not really knowing why.

"Mm.” Carol turns her head and nods, her skin drinking in the warm glow of the flames, a tiny smile on her lips. Something sparkles in her eyes. “I think it’s longer than yours.”

"Pfft.” 

“No,” Carol says, and the next thing he knows she’s turned to face him and he can feel her breath on his lips. (The knot in the pit of his stomach tugs tight. He didn’t realise they were sitting so close.) Smiling, she tilts their heads even closer, stretching out a strand of his hair against hers to compare. “See?”

Daryl can’t think of anything to say, and he doesn’t trust himself anyway with that damned lump back in his throat. So he just nudges her shoulder with his and drinks down the rest of his tea in one scalding gulp. 

(The lump does not burn or wash away.) 

____ _ _

It’s always after she goes and he’s left alone, sitting with his arms wrapped loosely around his muddy knees in the mouth of an empty tent, that other thoughts start creeping in. Daryl looks up at the branches swaying over head and picks a leaf apart in his grimy hands. He thinks about Ezekiel and about Henry, about Hilltop and the Kingdom and Alexandria. The world beyond the brown-green-grey borders he’s created for himself. 

(And he gets this weird feeling in his gut. It’s like his insides are full of broken glass. He just has to move slowly and carefully around the shards and they don’t hurt him at all. The lump in his throat when he thinks of her eyes – bold and bright, the colour of the best kind of sky – is always there, but it’s okay. He’s kind of used to it by now.)

He crumbles the leaf in his hand and lets it blow away up into the breeze. 

Habits become routines. _You look for Rick’s body in the river. You feel weird shit when you think about Carol. You get on_. This is the new world, and this is the new normal. And hell, he’s just glad to have a _normal_ at all. 

(Somewhere, his brother is _laughing_ at him. The first brother, the blood and bone brother. Calling him a _pussy ass bitch_. Now, though, the thought doesn’t make him miserable or furious. Hell, it might just make him smile.)

____ _ _

Some days, he wakes up with sunlight streaming through the thin fabric of the tent over his head, still drowsy, with fleeting images of her behind his eyelids, lingering from his dreams, and he wonders if she ever feels like this. If he ever crosses her mind and makes her feel like she’s carrying something shattered and sacred inside her. And if she too, has accepted that that’s simply the way it is. 

(He does. She has.)

____ _ _

This is the new normal, and slowly, steadily, they learn to live with it. They love each other deeply, as deep and strong as the roots of the dark trees they meet under. They don’t talk about it. (They don’t need to.) They don’t think about it. (They can’t bear to.) 

But they build their little lives around it, branches spreading wide. 

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

_v.i ( reset )_

____ _ _

____-_ _ _ _

____ _ _

It’s happening again. 

For ten years they’ve struggled down the same road, holding each other up when it gets hard, waiting patiently when they take turns to stagger and fall. And just when they thought they were reaching the end, they realised it had led them right back to where they started. 

To Carol’s body going weak in his arms, as if everything that’s been holding her up all this time has dropped away. To her knees buckling and her shoulders curling forward under the weight of the grief. All she can do is shake her head while her hair blows in the wind and whispers softly against his face. Tears sting his dazed eyes and something in his gut is burning but he holds onto her tight, refusing to let her fall. 

Their boots stumble and skid in the mud and grass. 

Time blurs. Melts. Henry, Sophia, Henry. (Lizzie, Mika, Sam, Beth.) What does it matter? They’re here again. They shouldn’t have to be here again, Daryl thinks. They shouldn’t be here again in this same dirt, holding onto each other like anchors as the grief breaks over their heads. 

(And yet. Grief and love have always gone hand in hand, like their hands hold on to each other now. A rose in a beer bottle. Laughter lighting up a prison cell. A bullet in a dead girl’s brain.) 

____ _ _

_( vi. the sixth stage, and the rest. )_

____-_ _ _ _

He sits down softly beside her, knees drawn up on the metal stairs.

He thinks of what Ezekiel said, out there in the snow. _Carol wants the same thing I do_. Thinks of the long walk under the snow-swollen sky, and her hand on his shoulder, somehow warm even through layers of leather and wool. Thinks about her voice and the look on her face, when she’d made sense of it all in three simple words. _I see you_. 

Because that’s what it is, at it’s heart. All the shit they ignored then raged against, all the fury and the pushing and the clinging in the dark, all the grieving and the loving and the fighting. That’s what the feeling is, the burning in his chest, the glass in his guts, the lump in his throat when she turns her eyes on him. She _sees_ him, right through to the core. She always has. 

Daryl curls his numb fingers around his water and sneaks a glance at her. She’s looking a little away from him, maybe on purpose, hat crammed low over her hair, coat collar crunched up high. Her skin is pale, cheek flushed with cold. In the dim dusty light, he’s close enough to count her eyelashes, and every barely-there freckle. Her blue eyes, fierce as the ice outside the steamy Sanctuary windows, are turned away. Her breath passes her lips and hangs, blurry white and balanced in the frosty air. 

_Yeah_ , he thinks, with his insides aching. _I see you, too_.

____ _ _

So he’s not surprised when she leaves with a strip of pale bare skin where a ring used to be. (Because _we don’t sleep. Ezekiel on the other hand sleeps like a baby_.) Because here in the throes of grief, there’s no room for anyone else. For years, they fell fiercely into their grief together. Now they _rise_ to it, gripping each other just as tight. It’s a process nobody else can understand, a process nothing else can touch. 

(Except maybe Lydia, the girl with eyes like his and a heart like hers, who carries her bruises and her grief just as they do, and speaks the same language, if haltingly, uncertainly.) 

____ _ _

The next day, they’re out in the snow, on the ground of the home where neither of them have lived for far too long, laughing and shouting. 

The kids streak by, Judith’s laugh filling the sky, RJ’s screams flurrying with the powdery handfuls of snow he flings at his sister, his mom, their family. Dog runs in circles, barking and kicking up the snow. RJ ducks his head and shrieks as Daryl darts after him, hands packed with snow, before one of Lydia’s snowballs catch him full in the face and he laughs, shaking his head, hair dripping icy snowmelt onto his stiff shoulders. It’s good to see her smiling, her eyes crinkling, snow clinging to her knees. 

The thought makes him throw a glance over at Carol, and when he sees her crouching to scoop together a snowball, something lodged deep within him gives a jerk. It ain’t bad, though. He feels weirdly light again, full of helium. Another snowball hits him in the chest, and he spins around to catch a flashing glimpse of Michonne’s smile for the first time in God knows how long, as bright as the wide white sky. 

His family run and shout around him and for once it’s not for their lives. They’re caught up in a relief so dizzying it has them playing like a bunch of kids. The snow falls softly around them, almost too pretty to be real, like the fake snow in a souvenir globe. Hard to believe they were all shit scared it was gonna be the death of them, just a day ago.

____ _ _

As they begin to slow down, breath ragged, cheeks and noses pink, hair damp, laughter ringing, Carol’s eyes meet his through the snow, bluer and clearer than the sharp winter sky above them. The snowball he’s making disintegrates in his gloved hands. Cold burns in his chest and his throat and for a moment, he’s frozen to the ground. He can’t look away. 

The kids are trying to keep the fight going (they’re stubborn like that, like their parents), though their tiny white missiles fly fewer and farther between. Someone’s laughing still, Lydia’s breathing hard and flurries of white rain down lightly over them all. 

But Carol’s tired eyes on his are a still blue promise, soft and sure. 

She doesn’t have to explain anything. Daryl understands, deep in his gut. They see each other, as they did all those years ago, standing in the sunburnt grass over a dead mans body. They see each other, and he knows.

____ _ _

Now is the time to fight back. 

To release their grief, release their love, to hold hands and rain down their broken bent-backed fury on the people who did this to them. 

____ _ _

Though maybe they also owe those people a _thank you_. After all. Their grief brought them together. Now it binds them even tighter, and that, he thinks, is what might just tear their enemies apart.

**Author's Note:**

> wow 
> 
> that was trash but so am i and i have no regrets


End file.
